Epicureanism

Classification

Period

c. 306 BCE - 270 CE

Regions

Europe (origin)

Domains

Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind

Overview

Epicureanism is the school Epicurus founded in the Garden at Athens around 306 BCE, and which survived in the Roman world into the third century CE. It identifies pleasure (hedone) as the highest good, but this is emphatically not hedonistic excess — the greatest pleasure is the absence of pain in the body (aponia) and of disturbance in the mind (ataraxia). Epicurus taught that the universe is composed of atoms and void, the gods do not intervene in human affairs, and death is simply the dissolution of atoms and therefore nothing to fear.

Key figures

Epicurus · Metrodorus · Lucretius

Positions held

• Libertarian Free Will

  The swerve is not in Epicurus's surviving writings; Lucretius and Cicero attribute it to him.

  Uncertain: Scholars dispute what freedom the swerve was meant to secure: some read it as the ability to do otherwise, while others argue that it protects our control over how our character develops (Furley, Bobzien) or only keeps the future open (O'Keefe), which is not free will in the modern sense.

  Question scope: Free Will

• Physicalism

  Epicurus held the soul to be a body of very fine atoms spread through the whole frame, which scatters when the body dies.

  Question scope: The Mind–Body Problem

Influenced by

• Atomism

  Epicurus took over Democritus' indivisible bodies moving in empty space, where shape, size and arrangement explain everything else. He then gave those atoms weight and an unpredictable swerve, so that motion would not run by the strict necessity Democritus accepted.

Later connections

• Classical Utilitarianism Influenced by this tradition

  Mill defended the greatest-happiness principle against the charge of being 'a doctrine worthy only of swine' by invoking the Epicureans, who had answered the same charge; the school's identification of the good with pleasure descends from that hedonist ancestry.

• Stoicism Reacted to this tradition

  The two schools competed directly on ethics (virtue versus pleasure) and physics (a providential logos versus the random swerve of atoms).

References

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Epicurus
• Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, tr. R. D. Hicks, 125 (death is nothing to us) and 131 (pleasure as the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Epicurus, §1 — Formation: Epicurus established the Garden at Athens in 306 BCE.
• Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus 63–67 (Diogenes Laertius X.63–67): the soul is a body of fine particles spread through the whole frame, it is scattered when the body is broken up, and those who call it incorporeal speak foolishly, because only the void is incorporeal and the void can neither act nor be acted upon
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Epicurus, §4 'Psychology and Ethics' (the soul consists of atoms, since an incorporeal thing could neither act on bodies nor be moved by them; no phenomena are purely mental)
• Lucretius, On the Nature of Things II.251–293: without an occasional swerve of atoms that breaks the decrees of fate, living things would not have the free will (libera voluntas) by which they move where they wish
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ancient Theories of Freedom and Determinism, introduction and §1.2 'Epicurus on the fatalist argument and determinism' (Epicurus holds causal determinism incompatible with human freedom, rejects determinism, and posits the swerve to escape fate) and §2.4 'The role of the swerve in protecting our freedom' (the rival readings of what the swerve protects)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Epicurus, §4 'Psychology and Ethics' (the swerve lets us wrest liberty from a mechanistic universe, although it is unclear whether Epicurus's idea of the will was like ours)
• Lucretius, On the Nature of Things III.161–176 (the nature of mind and spirit must be bodily, because they move the limbs and suffer from the blows of bodily weapons)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Dualism, §2.2 'Dualism in Greek Philosophy' (Epicurus argued that the soul is a collection of physical atoms that disperse at death, and Epicurean materialism later shaped contemporary materialism)
• A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (2nd ed., 1986), ch. 2 (Epicurus and Democritean atomism)
• Letter to Menoeceus — Epicurus
• On the Nature of Things — Lucretius